Many communication systems, particularly wireless systems, employ convolutional codes for mitigation of noise during transmission. A Viterbi decoder is generally used by a receiver to correct errors and extract user information from the convolutionally encoded data stream. A Viterbi decoder is a maximum likelihood decoder, provides excellent bit error rate performance, and easily incorporates soft information into the decoding process. However, Viterbi decoders introduce latency into the design. This latency can be an issue if the communication system employs embedded transmit parameters in the header of each information packet. Often, one or more header parameters need to be decoded before the user data portion of the packet can be processed. Thus, latency in the Viterbi decoder during header decoding affects how quickly the user data can be processed prior to the user data entering the Viterbi decoder.
Accordingly, a new system and method are needed to quickly decode time-sensitive header information.